I can’t believe it’s been ten years – seems like it was just a few weeks ago that I was driving up to Buffalo for our first production run.  But the gray hairs and the 20+ employees here in Bethesda remind me that a lot of tea leaves have given their lives since Barry and I started brewing tea leaves in my kitchen.

When we launched Honest Tea on February 2, 1998 the only assets we had were five thermoses, an empty Snapple bottle with a label pasted on it, and the name “Honest Tea” (though actually the thermoses were on loan).  Our beginnings were modest but our vision was bold – we wanted to create a delicious, healthier drink with a consciousness about the way the ingredients are grown.  We always knew the enterprise would be about more than moving cases – we wanted “Honest” to stand for a different way of doing business – a brand that is what it says it is, that strives for authenticity in the way it treats its customers and stakeholders.

It’s a little overwhelming to write about the tenth anniversary of Honest Tea, (maybe there’s a book out there), but since it’s exactly ten years since I started working full-time for Honest Tea, here are a few observations:

• Running Honest Tea has been the first “job” that’s stuck.  I remember my old boss, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, used to joke, “Seth can’t hold down a job,” because until 1998 I’d never spent more than two and a half years working with any company or organization.  The opportunity to build Honest Tea has been self-actualizing – the work reinvents itself on a regular, and occasionally, even an hourly basis, and it allows me to connect with everything I care about.
• As I have watched fellow entrepreneurs sell off one company and start another, I have come to realize that I am probably less of a serial entrepreneur than I thought.  I guess I’m more of a one-trick pony and Honest Tea is my “trick” – and it’s a pony that still has a lot of miles to go.
• People sometime ask me what is the best part about building Honest Tea, and by far the most rewarding aspects of the enterprise are:
  
  
  • The connection we make with our customers. For some we’re meeting their need for a great-tasting drink with less sugar, for others it’s a great-tasting drink that’s produced with consciousness and for others it’s just the feeling that there is a company out there that does business differently, whether it’s giving bikes to our employees, turning drink pouches into pencil bags, or feeding spent tea leaves to cows.
  • The connections and economic opportunity we create in the communities that supply us with our tea.
  • The feeling that we’ve created and are able to support a team of wonderful employees who care about what they’re doing, who care about each other, and who care about what we’re building together.

• In terms of the lowlights – there have certainly been plenty of those too.  Fortunately, as I grow older, my amnesia for the bad improves, so I don’t get weighed down by the setbacks we’ve had along the way.  Among the lowlights:
  
  
  • Rolling my car off an icy highway on a 2 a.m. drive through a blizzard from Buffalo.
  • Our voluntary recall in 2003 when we were a few broken glass bottles away from losing our largest customer and distributors.
  • Owning a bottling plant – despite our aspirations of wanting to create manufacturing jobs in an economically-challenged region, the experience helped illustrate that the best way for us to create economic opportunity is by building our brand.

In terms of what the future holds for Honest Tea, I hope and believe that the Honest brand will come to stand for authentic, organic and healthier beverages.  I still wake up every morning (even if that means 3 a.m., which it frequently does) fired up about what I’m doing.  

Though I still wear shorts to the office, I know that as we grow, the decade ahead won’t be like the one just ended.  Looking ahead I believe that the right strategy for Honest Tea is to align itself with a strategic partner who can help add distribution and production expertise – two areas that have often limited our growth.  Though some of our longtime customers might worry that partnering with a much larger company might be considered “selling out”, we are only considering opportunities where the partner “buys in” to our mission of sustainability and healthier products.  I want our business to be more than a model of change, I want us to be an agent of change and growing our business allows us to impact more consumers, their communities, and the environment in a positive way.

I’m sure there will be plenty of thrills and chills ahead… and I’m ready for all of them, (though I probably could do without cars rolling off the road.)  Our tea party is just getting started, and I hope you will be with us for the next ten years.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Blog from Seth & Barry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.